Projects
Designing Sustainable Coastal Landscapes in the Face of Sea-level Rise and Storms
Under a cooperative agreement funded by the Hurricane Sandy Disaster Mitigation Fund, Designing Sustainable Coastal Landscapes in the Face of Sea-level Rise and Storms, will add needed coastally relevant information to the Designing Sustainable Landscapes project for the North Atlantic region.
Decision Support Framework for Sea-level Rise Impacts
One of the principal impacts of sea-level rise will be the loss of land in coastal areas through erosion and submergence of the coastal landscape. However, changes vary across space and time and are difficult to predict because landforms such as beaches, barriers, and marshes can respond to sea level rise in complicated, dynamic ways. This project developed decision support models to address critical management decisions at regional and local scales, considering both dynamic and simple inundation responses to sea-level rise.
Identifying Resilient Sites for Coastal Conservation
Sea levels are expected to rise by one to six feet over the next century, and coastal sites vary markedly in their ability to accommodate such inundation. In response to this threat, scientists from The Nature Conservancy evaluated 10,736 sites in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic for the size, configuration and adequacy of their migration space, and for the natural processes necessary to support the migration of coastal habitats in response to sea-level rise.
iPlover: Piping plover habitat suitability in a changing climate
Designed by scientists to simplify consistent data collection and management, the iPlover smartphone application gives trained resource managers an easy-to-use platform where they can collect and share data about coastal habitat utilization across a diverse community of field technicians, scientists, and managers. With the click of a button, users can contribute biological and geomorphological data to regional models designed to forecast the habitat outlook for piping plover, and other species that depend upon sandy beach habitat.
Protection of Critical Beach-nesting Bird Habitats in the Wake of Severe Coastal Storms
Scientists developed models to examine the influence of landscape-scale variables like sea-level rise and beach-management strategies on bird nesting suitability.
Atlantic and Gulf Coast Resiliency Project
Coastal change is a shared challenge along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States, yet there are vast differences in the tools and information available in these regions. This project coordinated, synthesized, and delivered coastal resilience information, activities and lessons learned across the coastal portion of the Atlantic, Gulf and Caribbean Landscape Conservation Cooperative (LCC) network.
Beach and Tidal Habitat Inventories
This series of reports, databases, and data layers generated using Google Earth imagery provides an inventory of sandy beach and tidal inlet habitats from Maine to North Carolina, as well as modifications to sandy beaches and tidal inlets prior to, immediately after, and three years after Hurricane Sandy.
